RE: [dita-help] Layering in Help Systems

["Matthew Ellison" <matthew@ellisonconsulting.com>]

Greetings Tony, and Happy 2009 to you too!

Thanks for starting the new year with such an interesting question.  I
believe that information layering is a very important technique in user
assistance since our aim is to make the best possible use of the (usually
quite restricted) screen real estate that we have available.  Also, hiding
information and making it available only "on request" is a great way of
keeping Help topics concise and more inviting, especially for novice users.

I think it is possible to create a fairly rigid set of rules for when
information layering should be applied.  In response to your example: I
would say that, having established a convention for presenting footnotes,
this convention should be applied consistently throughout.  The only
argument I can think of against using a popup in a specific instance would
be if the amount of information displayed was too large -- but then, in that
case it probably wouldn't have been appropriate to mark it up as a footnote
in the DITA source.

Taking your other example of glossary terms, there is an argument for only
implementing an expansion link for the *first* occurrence of a specific
glossary term within any given topic.  All of the Help Authoring Tools that
support glossary term linking provide this as an option.  They also
typically enable "ad hoc" glossary term linking, but I don't see any good
reason for this.

Other examples of information types that might be implemented as layers are:

-- Images: these take up valuable space within a user assistance window and
are often omitted altogether -- however, it might be a good idea to make
them "user selectable".  Arguably it is less possible or desirable to apply
this as a rigid rule since there are likely to be specific images (perhaps
icons and buttons) that are critical to the effectiveness of the user
assistance and should not be layered

-- Tips: If layered, then they should have a meaningful and explicit hotspot
or trigger (not simply the word "Tip" since this provides no clue as to the
nature or relevance of the information)

-- Examples

-- Task sub-steps

-- Task main steps in cases where multiple tasks are chunked into a single
topic -- this rule could be difficult to implement since it would not make
sense to layer task steps in the more usual case of a task topic consisting
of a single set of steps.

Having said the above, my primary aim when applying information layers
within user assistance is to ensure that the entire topic (beginning and
end, but not necessarily all the detail in between) can be displayed to the
user without scrolling being required.  If the topic consisted *only* of a
short example, then it would not make sense (from a usability perspective)
to layer it.  On the other hand, if a topic consisted of six headings, then
it might make sense to layer the content of those six sections irrespective
of the nature of the information.  This suggests that, purely from the
perspective of usability, a Help-centric "layering" element might be useful.
However, on balance I would not be in favour of this due to the lack of
structure and predictability that this would introduce.

Best regards,

-Matthew

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Self [mailto:tself@hyperwrite.com] 
Sent: 06 January 2009 08:39
To: dita-help@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita-help] Layering in Help Systems

Greetings Colleagues, and Happy 2009! 

I'm interested in everybody's thoughts on whether layering features in Help
systems can be applied globally based on semantic mark-up, or whether there
is a need for "ad hoc" layering. By layering, I mean features such as
popups, expansion links and dropdown links. By "ad hoc", I mean an author
choosing that this lump of text would be best presented to the user in a
dropdown, for example.

As an example, let's say we render a footnote <fn> in the HTML output from a
DITA collection as a popup. Can we apply a rule that says "in all cases (for
this Help system), <fn> elements will be rendered as popups"? Or will there
be an instance where we need to say "oh, THIS <fn> needs to be treated
differently". If we further assume that a transformation process somehow
links any <term> elements with a corresponding glossary entry into an
expansion link to that glossary entry, can we safely way that this will
happen in all instances within the help system?

I'm trying to explore whether we actually need different semantic elements
for "Help" features. It would be philosophical sound if we could avoid
having help-centric DITA elements that ended up embedding presentation
information in the content. Or having some type of DITA mark-up that only
applied to Help systems.

What do you all think?

Regards

Tony Self


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